Modern libraries have experienced increased demands from patrons, in terms of needs for larger and larger holdings of books and other tangible materials. Accordingly, it is not uncommon for public libraries, for example, to handle collection and distribution of hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of books and materials. Tasks of librarians in handling these ever increasing volumes are often overwhelming.
Particularly problematic librarian tasks involve receiving, sorting, and ultimately re-shelving material returned from patrons. For example, these tasks, when manually performed by library personnel upon such ever-growing volumes of books and materials, greatly affect time required to repetitively collect and distribute each piece of material, i.e., "turn-around time" is negatively impacted. Manual performance of these tasks is known to lead to repetitive stress-type physical injuries. These injuries result, for example, from sorting and re-shelving tasks associated with repetitive grasping and positioning of each book or piece of material.
In attempts to minimize these problems, procedures have been developed to provide some degree of automation in such receiving, sorting, and re-shelving tasks. For example, librarians commonly employ wheeled carts, commonly known as "library carts," to transport library materials to be re-shelved. Each library cart usually has three shelves for holding materials in an upright manner, as they would appear on a library shelf. Nevertheless, general use of library carts, however, does not adequately address the aforementioned problems. The term cart, as used here-throughout, generally refers to those carts having shelves with open sides used in libraries and the like.
It should be further noted that valuable library staff time is consumed with selectively loading library carts for efficiency in performing re-shelving of the material. That is, typically a specific library cart is dedicated to returning material to a selected library area according to a library cataloging system. Such "dispatching" therefore efficiently directs each cart to only an area of the library selected to be served by the cart. By serving only a selected library area (i.e., library materials having specific cataloging identification) valuable library staff time is conserved by eliminating random travel throughout the library in random re-shelving. Of course, such selective library cart loading requires time investment from library staff in first determining where in the library certain material is to be re-shelved, then determining which cart is dedicated to that area, and then, finally, physically placing the material onto the particular dedicated library cart.
In general, attempts have been made to mechanically automate tasks of handling printed matter, and particularly books, thereby responding to problems associated with repetitive bending, grasping, and lifting and/or moving materials. For example, in automation pertaining to handling printed materials such as photocopies, U.S. Pat. No. 4,055,339 issued to Looney discloses a sorter apparatus to provide sorting or collating of copies. In U.S. Pat. No. 4,189,133 issued to Arrasmith, et al. a device is disclosed for automatically stacking continuous form documents on a table. U.S. Pat. No. 4,229,134 issued to Reist provides an apparatus for ejecting stacks of printed products from a receiver chute of a stacker device.
With regard to handling library materials, and books in particular, U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,640,407 and 3,776,404 issued to Anastasio, et al. disclose an apparatus for handling books that provides progressively formed book stacks to be removed to a delivery conveyor. U.S. Pat. No. 5,690,463 issued to Yoshie discloses an automated storage and retrieval system. Books handled in this system are required to be stored in barcode-addressed specialized multi-book containers. Such containers must be made an integral part of a library within which the system operates. Consequently, implementation of such a specialized system tends to increase library costs.
The aforedescribed patents however do not adequately address, for instance, the final re-shelving or "back-end" library circulation problem of automatically loading and compacting library materials onto commonly used standard library carts, both in terms of physically loading such carts, and in performing the selective cart and shelf loading operation.
An important consideration in the design of a library cart loading system is noise. Therefore there is a need for library cart loading systems with relatively low noise or unwanted audible sounds while in operation.
Thus, there exists a need for a library cart loading system that performs the task of automatically loading and compacting library materials on a library cart. A need exists for these functions to be performed without holding the material in specialized containers, and in a quiet manner.